[pvg]

does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?

No, it doesn't. There are probably other reasons to try emacs but 'as capable as a JetBrains IDE' is not among them.

As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim.

If you think of it not in terms of text editing but as "tool that operates on files" and "tool that operates on 'projects'", it makes more sense that many (most?) people end up doing something like this.

[Geminidog]

Yeah I can think of it that way. But I don't want to. I want a batteries included ide as lightweight as vim and as powerful as Clion, not two tools.

Currently you see a bunch of programmers divided into two camps. Those that prefer the vimish style and those that don't want to deal with the yak shaving and prefer tons of features.

The thing is these qualities are not actually tradeoffs in principle they are only tradeoffs by circumstance.

[0x445442]

Why not the IntelliJ Vim plugin with Clion? I think the better distinction is Vim for editing text, IDE for performing non text editing tasks.

[Geminidog]

It's less about the key mappings and more about the portability and lightweight nature of vim. So Clion runs on java and is really heavy while vim can be spun up instantly while you're sshed into any machine. I want both of these features combined.

[0x445442]

Ah, I did not see where development on a remote machine was the constraint. In that situation you’re options are more limited for sure.

[zozbot234]

I'm pretty sure that given enough yak-shaving, Emacs could be augmented with lots of IDE-like features that happen to be implemented in the main distribution, at least in some form. The question is whether you want to bother, given how obscure that whole area is.